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Monthly Archives: February 2018

I wanted to take a moment and relate a simple story to you. I was driving this evening and was stopping at a light where I saw a car pulling up to the road from an adjacent McDonald’s. In other words, they were obviously about to pull out in roughly the same place I would be stopping at the light. I stopped short to give them room to pull out ahead of me when the light turned green (the car in front of me was a little too far back for them to pull out at the moment).

Those of you who have perused my blog last year (or talked to me in person) know that I’m pretty stoked about containers. I think they are very cool conceptually and can bring a lot of value to streamlining the development process.

AWS has several options for containers and I wanted to do a VERY high level run through these to distinguish them a bit and maybe whet your appetite to dive into them a little more.

In this post we are going to build on the previous template and add the ability to take input and produce output. Sometimes you want to strictly define inputs in your template, but sometimes you want the ability for people to give their own values instead of writing tons of very specific templates for unique workflows. And we will also start looking at intrinsic functions as well, so plenty of good content here.

One of my few new goals for this year is to get back to blogging regularly about stuff I’m learning or interested in. Keep a look out here for (hopefully!) more content this year than previous years which might have had just a handful of posts.

AWS CloudFormation is a utility that allows you to define AWS “infrastructure” as code in text files called Templates. You can use it to deploy almost anything via JSON or YAML scripts. The deployed resources are collectively called stacks. There are other IaC options here as well, like Terraform, but I think it is handy to know the native toolset as well. Plus if you are going for AWS certifications you’ll need to be familiar with it.